Context brings the brightest minds to your living room with perspective-shifting online lectures.

Streetcars and Street Fights in Jim Crow New York with Dr. Richard Bell

Streetcars and Street Fights in Jim Crow New York with Dr. Richard Bell


No events are scheduled at this time. Want to be notified when it’s back? Click the blue button to the right and we’ll notify you.

Can't make this time? A video recording will be sent to all participants after the seminar.

She was shouting for someone to help her.

She was wrestling for a better hold of the window frame so that he couldn’t pull her outside and throw her on the ground. No one got up from their seats to stop him. Instead, they watched, all of them, mouths open, as if it were happening far away. The conductor was bigger, older, and stronger than she was, and he yanked and heaved at her until her grasp broke. But now she was grabbing at his coat. As she held on, she could see her friend, a woman he had already thrown out of this boxy, airless streetcar, pressed up against its side, her face a picture of horror and rage. She was screaming at him, begging him. Get your hands off her.

“You’ll kill her! Don’t kill her!”

The woman in this scene is Elizabeth Jennings, the twenty-five-year-old New Yorker who launched the first successful civil disobedience campaign in US history. On Sunday, July 16, 1854, Jennings, an African American school-teacher and choir-mistress, stepped onto a “whites only” streetcar on Third Avenue. She was the first among a small army of young Black female New Yorkers to fight to end apartheid on urban transit in New York. Led by University of Maryland historian Richard Bell, this Conversation examines why streetcars were the locus of such frequent and fraught attempts to police the color line in the Jim Crow North and why Black women drove this extraordinary campaign for civil rights.

Dr. Richard Bell is Professor of History at the University of Maryland. He holds a PhD from Harvard University and has won more than a dozen teaching awards, including the University System of Maryland Board of Regents Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has held major research fellowships at Yale, Cambridge, the Library of Congress and is the recipient of the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship and the National Endowment of the Humanities Public Scholar Award. Professor Bell is author of the new book "Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and their Astonishing Odyssey Home," which was shortlisted for the George Washington Prize and the Harriet Tubman Prize.

This conversation is suitable for all ages.

90 minutes, including a 30 minute Q&A.

Customer Reviews

Based on 4 reviews
100%
(4)
0%
(0)
0%
(0)
0%
(0)
0%
(0)
K
Kris Shapar
Great talk!

Fascinating, illuminating, infuriating lecture about a subject hitherto unknown to me - with an interesting subtopic on the part public transportation played in the development of New York. Essential.

S
Suzette Shelmire (Oxford, US)
Street cars and Street Fights in Jim Crow N.Y

I waited to hear the recording: My comment is: Once again Dr Bell has taught me that racism was rampant in all parts of the United States whether it was slave or Free states. This was a WONDERFUL lecture and I will listen to this one again!!

J
J (London, GB)
The black women who made a difference

Thought stimulating conversation about the bravery and determination of black women in NY to have equal treatment as people using the transit system in the 1850s

M
M.K. (Havre de Grace, US)
Now in Context: The (Previously) Untold History of NYC's Jim Crow Streetcars

History untold means we cannot develop a full understanding of our time.
Until Dr. Bell revealed the struggle to desegregate NYD's early streetcar system -- the largest and much-admired and emulated in the country -- as part of the overall story of slavery and its continual reverberations in the entirety of our county, I was largely unware and careless of the history of slavery in the North.
Bravo to Dr. Bell for his continuing and excellent work to uncover and then communicate to the public our shared history.
Only through a general understanding and wide knowledge of our own history can we, the People, properly pursue our continuing journey toward a more perfect union.

Customer Reviews

Based on 4 reviews
100%
(4)
0%
(0)
0%
(0)
0%
(0)
0%
(0)
K
Kris Shapar
Great talk!

Fascinating, illuminating, infuriating lecture about a subject hitherto unknown to me - with an interesting subtopic on the part public transportation played in the development of New York. Essential.

S
Suzette Shelmire (Oxford, US)
Street cars and Street Fights in Jim Crow N.Y

I waited to hear the recording: My comment is: Once again Dr Bell has taught me that racism was rampant in all parts of the United States whether it was slave or Free states. This was a WONDERFUL lecture and I will listen to this one again!!

J
J (London, GB)
The black women who made a difference

Thought stimulating conversation about the bravery and determination of black women in NY to have equal treatment as people using the transit system in the 1850s

M
M.K. (Havre de Grace, US)
Now in Context: The (Previously) Untold History of NYC's Jim Crow Streetcars

History untold means we cannot develop a full understanding of our time.
Until Dr. Bell revealed the struggle to desegregate NYD's early streetcar system -- the largest and much-admired and emulated in the country -- as part of the overall story of slavery and its continual reverberations in the entirety of our county, I was largely unware and careless of the history of slavery in the North.
Bravo to Dr. Bell for his continuing and excellent work to uncover and then communicate to the public our shared history.
Only through a general understanding and wide knowledge of our own history can we, the People, properly pursue our continuing journey toward a more perfect union.